In a posting by Stan Carey yesterday (“How awkwardly to avoid split infinitives”), this Ozy and Millie cartoon:
Archive for the ‘Peeving’ Category
Split those infinitives!
July 12, 2012Garmmra meets expletives
July 11, 2012
New-ironic
July 9, 2012Today’s Zits:
This is “new-ironic“, here conveying ‘unfortunate, inappropriate’ — a usage that has been widely savaged by usage critics.
The invention of grammar, peeving, and counterpeeving
June 15, 2012From Stan Carey, a link to this Cyanide and Happiness cartoon:
For “article adjectives”, read just “articles”. And add verb inflections.
And note that the cavemen’s speech before the “invention of grammar” did in fact have a grammar of its own. So what we get here is the usual view that grammar means ‘correct grammar’ — that is, the grammar for the formal written standard variety of the language. (Of course, you can ask how standardization would work in caveman society.)
Damn you, Dryden!
May 3, 2012John McIntyre has just posted a piece on his Baltimore Sun blog that ends with with a footnote:
A friend on Facebook apologized today for a sentence ending in a preposition. Damn you, John Dryden, I can forgive almost anything for the author of “Mac Flecknoe” and those lovely translations of Virgil’s Georgics, but I wish to God you had kept your mouth shut about stranded prepositions in English.
Amen to that. Dryden is the sad source of years of utterly unnecessary grammatical unhappiness.
live close?
May 1, 2012Back on April 13th, mail (lightly edited below) from someone who had just found Language Log and my “Open and closed” posting of 3/28/08:
I just discovered this site tonight & I swear I see an error.
No offense. I am no linguist, but you said “Since there’s no adjective close /kloz/ in English, the stative adjective closed gets to fill its slot in the pattern”.
I’d like to differ in opinion. Close, as in proximity of objects to others or near, drives me nuts.
There are signs in Minneapolis that read “live close” in advertisement of college-time housing.
When I first drove by the signs I only noticed the word live having double meaning. I hadn’t thought of close initially but there were multiple signs along that road so I always saw the phrase more than once at a time.
Two points here: one about spellings and pronunciations, and one about judgments of usage.
Grammandos and more
March 5, 2012From yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, in the “One-Page Magazine”, Lizzie Skurnick’s regular “That Should Be a Word” feature, appropriate for National Grammar Day:
GRAMMANDO
(Gruh-MAN-doh), n., adj.
1. One who constantly corrects others’ linguistic mistakes. “Cowed by his grammando wife, Arthur finally ceased saying ‘irregardless.’ ” See also: Dictaplinarian (enforces correct pronunciation); Spellot (takes a red pen to all documents).
On the garmmra watch
February 26, 2012From several sources recently, a January 31st LitReactor column by Jon Gingerich on “20 Common Grammar Mistakes”. Of course, it’s about garmmra, not actually about grammar — as Stan Carey asked rhetorico-challengingly on his blog, “Where’s the grammar in these “common grammar mistakes”? — but, for a change, it’s not a mish-mash of (putative) mis-steps in language, but a focused list: it’s all about word choice. Not about spelling, punctuation, linguistic politeness, and so on, but also not about such perennial syntactic peeve-faves as ending a sentence with a preposition, beginning a sentence with a coordinating conjunction, or splitting infinitives. Instead: it’s all
Don’t use word X; to convey this meaning, use Y instead.
(and at least two commenters noted this).
It’s All Grammar
February 22, 2012Commenter James C. on my “Grammar shit” posting:
What would you propose instead of ‘grammar’ as a cover term for things like spelling, punctuation, and other topics of peeveology?
I’ve pondered about this for quite a few years now; my current position is to challenge the folk categorization of all these things as having something in common. But first, a little history of IAG (It’s All Grammar) on Language Log and this blog.